There are so many things we didn't know back then.

Byline: Albert B. Southwick

COLUMN: ALBERT B. SOUTHWICK

I recently read an article in The American Scholar that made me realize how much our knowledge of the physical world has changed since I graduated from Clark University in 1941.

It was written by Dr. Robert P. Lanza, vice president for research at Advanced Cell Technology, and it is titled "A New Theory of the Universe." I'm not sure that I understand it completely, but his main argument is that we cannot hope to comprehend the universe by means of physics alone. Biology, particularly human consciousness, must be a vital part of the equation, he thinks.

Dr. Lanza believes that nothing exists in the world unless it has been observed by an observer. "The observer in a significant sense creates reality and not the other way around."

He calls this process "biocentrism" and insists that none of the big cosmic theories - the Big Bang, string theory, space-time, gravity, quantum mechanics - can by themselves explain the physical world. Time and space have no external existence. They are artifacts, "animal-sense perceptions." He believes that quantum physics, that mysterious concept that no one fully understands, has pretty much destroyed the old Newton-Einstein concept of the universe.

Those ideas would have made no sense 65 years ago, even at a place as sophisticated as Clark University. Here are some of the things that we didn't know about at that time:

1. The Big Bang. I can't remember thinking much about the origin of the universe, but I suspect that we probably assumed that it was eternal, with no beginning or end. Actually, the so-called "steady state" hypothesis made the same assumption. Had we been told that the universe sprang out of nothing with a humongous eruption of energy 14 billion years ago, and that the stars and galaxies are still flying apart at tremendous speeds, creating space and time as they travel outward, we would have found it hard to believe. As for the current speculation that our universe is a spinoff of a much larger "multiverse," I suspect that we would have been baffled.

2. Tectonic plates. I took a course in geology at Clark, but never heard a word about tectonic plates. The reason is that nobody knew anything about them in those days, which means that nobody understood much about volcanoes and earthquakes. Nowadays it is widely understood that these huge slabs of the earth's crust, five to 25 miles thick, hundreds and thousands of miles wide, riding on the molten core of the globe, grind together at the edges, setting off volcanic action, earthquakes and tsunamis.

3. Dark matter and dark energy. If we had been told 60 years ago that, even with the most powerful telescopes, we can see only 5 percent of the universe and that the other 95 percent is concealed in an invisible form of energy and matter, detected only by its gravitational power, we would have been dubious, to say the least.

4. Quantum mechanics. As noted above, quantum mechanics, which deals in probabilities rather than clearly defined certainties, is not fully understood by anyone. Yet it has become the standard calculation technique for the world of small-particle physics and is said to be remarkably effective. But it would have meant nothing to us. We had read about Albert Einstein and his theory that time is a fourth dimension, but that was about as far as we could go. We had no inkling of his contribution to quantum mechanics and his deep doubts about the whole uncertainty principle on which quantum mechanics is based. And we were unaware of his long and ultimately fruitless effort to link his theory of gravity to the laws that control the world of the small particle, thus creating the ultimate theory of the universe. According to Dr. Lanza, any such undertaking is doomed to failure unless it includes biocentrism. Physics and mathematics by themselves are not enough, he maintains.

5. String theory. This hypothesis that all matter and energy are derived from strings of energy, infinitesimally small, and that there are as many as 11 dimensions in the universe in addition to our familiar space and time, would have seemed bizarre speculation to us, as it does to many physicists today. Like the theory of the multiverse, string theory cannot be tested nor proved. But 60 years ago it was not even speculation.

Just the listing of those five concepts, so prominent today, shows how far the world of science has moved since 1940. In some respects, physics has made more progress in the last 70 years than it did in the previous 5,000.

The field of biology also has been revolutionized, particularly in the discoveries about the human gene. But that would not have been a radical surprise to us. We knew something about genes and chromosomes and the unraveling of the genetic code would have seemed a logical development.

What would have surprised us, I think, is the current furor about Charles Darwin and evolution. We took evolution for granted and never questioned that Mr. Darwin had proved it, once and for all. The idea that God created the world in a little more than 6,000 years would have struck us as preposterous. Most of us, I suspect, have not changed our opinions in that regard.

As for Sigmund Freud, we knew, of course, that he had visited Clark in 1909 and had given some lectures on psychoanalysis.

Although we didn't know much about his specific theories, his general philosophy about human nature and development was an integral part of the world we lived in, particularly at Clark. It is ironic that the Clark Department of Psychology today is no longer considered Freudian. According to some psychologists, Freud is passe, little better than a spinner of fables and inventor of theories that no longer hold water.

Times change. Ideas mutate. What seemed true yesterday may not be held as true today or tomorrow. The world of 1940 was more different from today than most people realize.

What about the next 60 or 70 years. What will our world seem like in 2075?

If Dr. Lanza is correct, that will depend on how effectively the findings of biology are integrated with those of physics and mathematics. And that, he believes, depends on whether scientists can unlock the key to human consciousness, still largely a mystery. As he puts it:

"We are living through a profound shift in worldview, from the belief that time and space are entities in the universe to one in which time and space belong to the living ... Only for a moment, while we sort out the reality that time and space do not exist, will it feel like madness."

Albert B. Southwick's column appears regularly in the Sunday Telegram.